Finsler Geometry, Graph Neural Networks, and You

arXiv:2606.17185 · cs.LG, eess.SP, math.DG, stat.ML · Submitted 2026-06-15 · Read on arXiv

T. Mitchell Roddenberry, Richard G. Baraniuk

cs.LG, eess.SP, math.DG, stat.ML

Submitted: 2026-06-15

Code: https://github.com/ax-ml/jax

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Graph neural network architectures based on the graph Laplacian approximate the Laplace-Beltrami operator, thus limiting their application to isotropic operators.

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Abstract

Graph neural network architectures based on the graph Laplacian approximate the Laplace-Beltrami operator, thus limiting their application to isotropic operators. As a nonlinear alternative to the Laplace-Beltrami operator, we consider estimates of the Finsler Laplacian on point clouds sampled from a manifold. We prove that these discrete estimates converge to the true operator on the manifold as the number of point samples grows. Moreover, we show that this operator can be expressed as a graph neural network layer, which we use to define a family of Finslerian graph neural networks constrained to express Finsler geometry. We show that Finslerian graph neural networks recover the geometry underlying nonlinear diffusion equations in practice.

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